Thursday, January 11, 2007

When your only meals together are Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the stress of the holidays has taken a toll and you feel as if you're playing Tag Team Parenting it might be time for a Family Night where everything else get puts on hold for some R & R. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Hold a Family Olympics. This could be as simple as "Who can pull Dad off the couch?" or as involved as walking balance beams and sack races. Awards or no awards, it's the fun and silly ceremony that counts. We'll string donuts along the outdoor clothesline and have a dangling donut-eating contest or practice our field goals with a soccer ball and a laundry basket.

2. Create a family journal. Get a composition book and let each member takes turns entering a paragraph. Can include pictures, favorite jokes, or individual responses to questions such as, "What was the funniest/saddest/silliest thing that happened to you this year?"

3. Hold a family book club. Charlotte's Web, Harry Potter, Little Women, read it together and then talk about it.

4. Hold parent/child interviews and videotape them. Make up a list of questions for your child and then interview them "60 Minutes" style and videotape the whole thing.

5. Hold a family planning session for an upcoming season. At Thanksgiving our family sits down and makes a list of everything we might want to do during the Christmas season then each person can vote for one thing--then we schedule those activities in. Ice fishing, sledding, skiing, camping, whatever is voted for we do. Works well for vacations too.

6. Create a family time capsule.

7. Hold a family recital or talent show.

8. Play Giant games. These are just games where family members are the pieces, like tic tac toe. Members wear different colored hats or paper Xs and Os on their shirts and I use masking tape on the floor to make the game board.

9. Plant and tend a family garden. Indoors or out there's something about digging in dirt that appeals to kids and producing something as a family can appeal to everyone.

10. Visit a local historical or cultural site. Museums, parks, battlefields or historic homes--study about it and then visit.

11. Tie a quilt together. It's an old-fashioned activity that gives everyone a chance to talk. Small children can color with fabric markers on the quilt before adults tie it.

12. Bake something together. Even if it's just rice krispie treats, the kitchen is a place to bond like no other.

13. Go to the library.

If you don't have enough people for any of these activities, invite another family to join. Next week will be part two.

Thanks for the new creative ideas. We try and get all the kids together for some family activities which usually means Scene It? games in front of the TV...which is fun, but these new ideas will give us some new things to do.

Well.... we do #10 a lot. The kids all love museums, and castles (see my TT for a list). We really can't do #12 with more than two people (see week-before-last's TT for a picture of my tiny kitchen). And we sort of do #3: I read to the boys at breakfast, and we talk about what we're reading a lot.

But then again, we eat dinner together every night, and family time is not a problem (we have other problems--it's just that spending time together as a family isn't one of them. *g*)

Those are great ideas. I think that would be fun.Thanks for stopping by my T13. To answer your question, "I swanie" is similar to 'I swear'. It would be used in response to surprising news. For instance, if I were told that someone I know well had had an affair, I might respond with, "Well, I swanie".

A family time capsule sounds great! :) These are some really nice ideas of fun things to do. My daughter has a report due soon, so we'll be taking a family trip to the library so that she can have an alternate method of research!

Wonderful Ideas! My daughter and I love to bake together... unfortunately daddy isn't big on sweets so he takes them to work. His (female) boss threatened to fire him, so we stopped for awhile, LOL! I love the family picture BTW. happy TT!

I found your blog via CHBM and I just love the way you've organized it with your topics across the top... How did you get the the posts for each topic to pop up when the mouse scrolls over the topic index? Did you manipulate the html yourself or is it a template you found? Tell me more!

Those are such good ideas. We're hoping for a family road trip this summer. My husband has to work so much and so he doesn't get as much time with the kids. Things are slowing down a little though (thankfully) and this week he had his usual three days off. It was so nice.